The present invention relates to segmentation of the liver in medical images, and more particularly, to automatic segmentation of the liver in magnetic resonance images using multi-channel features.
Segmentation of anatomical structures, such as the liver, in medical images is a fundamental building block in many clinical workflows. Manual delineation of the liver in medical images can be a challenging and time-consuming task, and there can be significant inter-user and intra-user variability among manual segmentations of the liver. Common to all medical imaging modalities, the problem of segmenting the liver is challenging due to shaper or organ variability. In computed tomography (CT) images, the intensities in the image are measured in the common Hounsfield units, making it easier to rely on organ specific intensity priors for organ segmentation. In contrast, the units for measuring intensity in magnetic resonance (MR) images vary in different scans, so such global intensity cues cannot be relied on for organ segmentation in MR images. Accordingly, a method for fully automatically segmentation of the liver in MR images is desirable.